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The Who's Who of Zen BuddhismThu, 19 Feb 2015 15:23:18 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Buddhism, Cosmology and Evolutionhttp://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-cosmology-and-evolution/
http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-cosmology-and-evolution/#commentsSun, 26 Feb 2012 06:31:31 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44307Even with all these profound scientific theories of the origin of the universe, I am left with serious questions: What existed before the big bang? Where did the big bang come from? What caused it? Why has our planet evolved to support life? What is the relationship between the cosmos and the beings that have ...

Even with all these profound scientific theories of the origin of the universe, I am left with serious questions: What existed before the big bang? Where did the big bang come from? What caused it? Why has our planet evolved to support life? What is the relationship between the cosmos and the beings that have evolved within it? Scientists may dismiss these questions as nonsensical, or they may acknowledge their importance but deny that they belong to the domain of scientific inquiry. However, both these approaches will have the consequence of acknowledging definite limits to our scientific knowledge of the origin of our cosmos. I am not subject to the professional or ideological constraints of a radically materialistic worldview. – The Dalai Lama

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin

For traditional Buddhist cosmology, the life cycle of a universe is cyclical. There is a period of its formation, a period where it endures, a period where it disintegrates and a period of void before a new universe forms from the luminous space that remains. That space, according to theKalachakra Tantra (Wheel of Time) is inseparable from beginningless, universal consciousness.

The constraints of scientific materialism

A very different perspective is offered by mechanistic science. From its European origins in the 17th century to its final triumph in the 19th, it has insisted that matter is non-conscious stuff interacting in dead space. And these premises are not merely intellectual abstractions. They have become beliefs about reality, shared by a globalizing human culture. The structure of our subjective experience is inevitably influenced by the notion that we too are mechanisms located in a non-conscious mechanical universe.

Such presuppositions have presented no obstacle to spectacular progress in science, instrumentation and technology. They are rarely questioned within the belief systems most common in science or society. We might know that quantum physics has revealed solid matter to be forms of energy and process, but we prefer not to consider the implications of the fact that, with such discoveries, materialism is transcending itself.

From zero-point field to the world-wide web

Quantum electrodynamics is a powerfully predictive theory developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It proposes that virtual particles, electrons and photons appear and disappear from a zero-point field, the quantum vacuum that pervades the universe. This is eerily similar to how Buddhist cosmology describes the nature of the cosmos, originating within a luminous space that is the ground of consciousness itself.

An economics-driven culture like ours prefers to compartmentalize such discoveries, rather than reflect upon and perhaps be changed by them. It eagerly embraces every technological application of quantum physics — from semi-conductors, lasers and fibre optics to computers to the internet. It bows to their trillion dollar economic impacts. The message is clear: forget the cosmology — it’s the economy, stupid!

An evolving universe

But can we really forget the cosmology, without losing the plot for our own species? We first beheld the grandeur of the evolutionary process with Charles Darwin’s findings about the origin of life on Earth. And what is true for the origin of species on our planet no doubt reflects a universal principle: we live in an evolving universe, not an inanimate machine.

As Thomas Berry pointed out, if we restore the fundamental unity of spirit and matter, artificially split apart by scientific materialism, the scientific story of the universe can also serve beautifully as our new sacred story. For Buddhist cosmology, biological evolution presents no problem at all: natural history and spiritual history are two sides of the same coin. The beginningless consciousness of luminous space gave rise to this evolving universe and from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. But it is not inevitable that those endless forms will continue to evolve in a natural way.

The biggest news for 65 million years

The self-creation of the Earth over time has continued for 4.5 billion years. Biological life emerged as single-celled organisms about 3.8 billion years ago. Multicellular life forms are 1 billion years old. Our “anatomically modern” human species is a mere quarter of a million years old. As Wes Nisker writes in his Evolution Sutra, we are just the new animal on the block.

Those lineages of life forms have co-evolved through extraordinary challenges of extinction and adaptation. “Mass extinction events” took place 440, 360, 245 and 208 million years ago. The fifth took place 65 million years ago, when a giant meteorite hit the Yucatan peninsula. The dinosaurs vanished, ending the era of giant reptiles and beginning the era of mammals like ourselves — the Cenozoic.

Biologists and earth scientists agree that in the 20th century a sixth mass extinction began, and the only one to be caused by a particular species: us. Coral reefs are likely to be the first entire ecosystem to be eliminated from the Earth by human activity. A quarter of plant and animal species may vanish by 2050, an evolutionary crisis that is related to global climate breakdown but usually overshadowed by it. In essence, our present economic model is pushing all life on Earth towards tipping points for both biodiversity and the climate system.

This is quite possibly the biggest news for 65 million years, but it barely makes the mainstream news at all, because it raises taboo questions for the industrial growth society that we have come to take for granted. We’d rather not think about the implications for our way of living today, and the consumerism purveyed by advertising and corporate propaganda encourages us not to bother. It’s a lot more reassuring to keep up with the sport! But the disquieting questions remain. Why are we risking general evolutionary collapse? Aren’t we here to survive and thrive? Why has our planet evolved to support life anyway?

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-cosmology-and-evolution/feed/0A Buddhist Ecology of Selfhttp://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-ecology-of-self/
http://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-ecology-of-self/#commentsMon, 30 Jan 2012 06:29:14 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44304I saw that ordinary people believe they have a self and that everyone they meet has a self. They think of it as within the body. Because it is not like that, I have shown that the self is not there in the way it is thought to be. This is expedient means, the right ...

I saw that ordinary people believe they have a self and that everyone they meet has a self. They think of it as within the body. Because it is not like that, I have shown that the self is not there in the way it is thought to be. This is expedient means, the right medicine.

But that does not mean there is no self. What is the self? If something is true, is real, is constant, is a foundation of a nature that is unchanging, this can be called the self. For the sake of sentient beings, in all the truths I have taught, there is such a self.
— Buddha, in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra

There are two distinct versions of the Mahaparinirvana sutra, a fundamental text whose subject is the final days and sayings of the Buddha’s life. The version in the early Buddhist Pali Canon, like other texts of that tradition, denies that there is any real self. The citation above is from the Mahayana Buddhist sutra (first two centuries CE) that offers a quite different view of human self. Are these two traditions of Buddhism actually disagreeing with each other? It depends on what we mean by “the self.” And that is not just a subject for introspection. It has significant implications for how we see and interact with our world.

Early life:

There is something universal and endearing in the drawings of very young children. These stick figures, box houses and animals and the relationships among them are also our first models of ourselves. They express our earliest understanding of who we are, without the rigidity of the conscious self that we acquire by about six years old, the age of reason.

Up to two years of age, an infant’s brain operates mainly at the lowest EEG frequency delta waves of less than 4 cycles per second. From two to six years old, progressively more theta waves of 4-8 cycles/second become the norm. In adults, both these frequencies are characteristic of hypnotic trance. They are suggestible and programmable states, linked to the subconscious mind. Young children subconsciously model the information they need to survive and thrive in the home, in the process absorbing many of their parents’ beliefs and behaviors.

We don’t much employ the higher frequency beta waves of active, focused consciousness (over 12 cycles/second) until puberty. By that time we believe the emerging adolescent self is within our body. Sometimes we are painfully aware it might not actually “be there” in the way our peers seem to assume, but we’re not usually aware of an alternative understanding.

Schooling does not often help. Rather than investigating what the self really is, and what brings it happiness, contemporary education has become a largely utilitarian project. It orients us outwardly to social competition for identity, job, consumer goods and a mate. It reduces the totality of the self to a narrowly-focused ego and social self.

Self-esteem vs self-destructiveness:

What about the key emotional factor of self-esteem? The Dalai Lama has remarked that our mother is our first guru. And the psychologist Erich Fromm pointed out that there is nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of what love, joy and happiness are than being loved by a mother who loves herself. Indeed, self-acceptance and self-appreciation are the basis of self-esteem.

Neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen calls these qualities an internal pot of gold that good parents share with their offspring. What their fortunate children absorb is a lifetime capacity for empathy, resilience and love. Sadly, as everyone knows, there are other instances where the pot contains baser, or even toxic elements that become seeds of later self-destructiveness.

The ecological self:

The philosopher Arne Naess was a co-founder of Deep Ecology. He observed that people who are mature in their relationships can spontaneously identify with all living beings. He proposed that humans have an ecological self, which consists of that with which we identify. To take one pressing example, the Earth in all its splendor and biodiversity is now at risk of runaway global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels. It will not be spared this devastating fate unless many of us realize and express strong identification with the whole community of life.

Self-realization:

Naess believed that as we develop and mature through the fulfilment of our inherent potentialities, the self deepens and broadens. This process, which he termed self-realization, is not the one-dimensional, narcissistic fulfilment of ego trips. Genuine self-realization leads us to see ourselves in others. We take pleasure in their self-realization as well as our own. In fact, there is awareness that the self-realization of others is not separate from our own.

That understanding provides a much sounder basis than moral exhortation to help us accomplish something beautiful, resilient and environmentally sustainable. It has a special relevance for our response to the global ecological crisis, because both environmental science and ethics have (so far) failed to overturn the deceits of consumerism.

The consumer self:

When “self-realization” is misinterpreted as a lifetime of ego trips, we gulibly identify with the simulated realities of the media, and the consumer goods its advertisements promote. The weaker our intrinsic self-esteem, the more likely we are to develop what social psychologist Clive Hamilton calls a consumer self.

A transformation in the meaning of consumption from “meeting needs” to a way of “acquiring identity” has been going on for decades. Contemporary advertising builds up powerful symbolic associations between products and attractive psychological states. Compelling as they are, neither the products nor their associations provide any genuine identity or fulfillment.

At the core of the consumer self is a gnawing dissatisfaction that keeps it addicted to getting and spending. Economic growth, Hamilton points out, no longer creates happiness. Unhappiness sustains economic growth. The consumer self is a victim of corporate psychopathic fiction.

The universal Self:

What the Buddha calls the real, foundational and unchanging self in our beginning quotation above is termed the Self in Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta. For the Buddhist non-dual system of Dzogchen, the Self is a synonym for the Buddha-nature and the ground of all.

Gandhi, the great proponent of nonviolent social activism, saw no distinction between non-duality and social action: “I believe in advaita. I believe in the essential unity of all that lives — What I want to achieve is self-realization, to see God face-to-face, to attain liberation. All my ventures in the political field are directed to this same end.”

Ecological philosopher Thomas Berry extended this identification to the whole universe as “a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects.” There is practical importance in such principles. They can sustain us as we work to replace the grandiose self-destructiveness of our civilization with a new ecological modesty and wisdom. Thomas Berry eloquently expressed the appropriate sense of proportion as follows: “It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.”

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-ecology-of-self/feed/0Beyond the Matrix — A Buddhist Approachhttp://sweepingzen.com/beyond-the-matrix-a-buddhist-approach/
http://sweepingzen.com/beyond-the-matrix-a-buddhist-approach/#commentsMon, 02 Jan 2012 06:22:08 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44299“To be, or not to be: that is the question.” –Hamlet “Psychopaths are capable of taking the perspective of somebody else, but only to take better advantage of you. They’re able to play the empathy game, but without the feelings involved. It’s like an empty shell. The core of empathy — being in tune with ...

“Psychopaths are capable of taking the perspective of somebody else, but only to take better advantage of you. They’re able to play the empathy game, but without the feelings involved. It’s like an empty shell. The core of empathy — being in tune with the feelings of somebody else — seems to be completely lacking. They are like aliens among us.”
–Frans de Waal

The Believing Brain

The human brain often functions as a “believing organ.” Our beliefs develop for many different subjective and psychological reasons, and according to various contexts (family, relationships, culture, media, advertising). There is evidence that many beliefs are largely subconscious in nature. That does not stop us inventing conscious explanations for them. We rationalize, defend and fight for our beliefs — often as if our identity depended upon it. And often it does.

If some new reality challenges our mental map, our understanding of it will usually be limited by our old beliefs. Evidently human ideologies provided some evolutionary advantage in the past. But the enormous evolutionary crisis we are now facing requires rapid creative adaptation to unprecedented realities. The believing organ is being challenged as never before.

Democracy or Corporatocracy?

At the outset of the 21st century, the dominant institution is not government but business corporations, which have learned how to manipulate the democratic process. These legal entities have an insatiable appetite for profit and work to undermine any limitations on their power to pursue it. A prime example was the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to permit unlimited corporate cash donations to political campaigns. Big Carbon companies responded to this new legalization of corruption by financing lavish advertising to capture a majority in the House of Representatives. Defying the unprecedented frequency of extreme weather events occurring worldwide — including a record 12 events imposing aggregate damages of $52 billion on the U.S. itself — their “representatives” blocked any attempts to address the climate crisis. They attacked environmental regulations across the board and cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (which they also threatened to abolish). They organized witch-hunts of eminent climate scientists, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

With this act of political “shock and awe,” Big Carbon forced its agenda down the throat of the world’s most powerful country. Although climate science shows clearly that extracting and burning the remaining fossil fuels will make global warming irreversible within a decade, such corporations are still determined to direct all political discourse and decisions to bolster their own record profits. How can they get away with making our world un-liveable? Because the top 200 oil, coal and gas companies have a combined value of $7.4 trillion, based on proven fossil fuel reserves that “the market” expects to burn.

Many people say they cannot understand how the corporate executives concerned can ignore the ecological tragedy that is unfolding for their own children and grandchildren. They are sacrificing the future of the biosphere for short-term profit. “Are they inhuman?” we ask. Like de Waal’s psychopaths, they seem to lack the core of empathy that 99 percent of us take for granted. This suggests an obvious question: Does lack of empathy make it easier to climb to the top of the corporate ladder?

Zero Empathy, Institutionalized

Over a decade ago, the psychiatrist Robert Hare evaluated corporate behaviour toward society and the world by applying standard diagnostic criteria to the business practices of these so-called “legal persons.” The diagnosis that fitted best was antisocial personality disorder — in other words, psychopathy. This finding came a few years after evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson wrote an insightful essay on the global ecological crisis, titled “Is Humanity Suicidal?”

Research by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues has more recently identified the circuit in our brain that generates spontaneous empathy for others’ feelings. Unsurprisingly, it is underactive in individuals who commit acts of cruelty. Unfeeling cruelty toward others has traditionally been called “evil.” Now we have a precise neurogenetic definition: “zero-empathy” is the root of all evil.

As the power of corporate institutions has increased, so has that of its ideology — economic theory, which continues to exalt the beneficial nature of “the free market.” Market forces must be allowed to wreak unregulated “creative destruction” on ecosystems, cultures, democracy and globalized society alike. Empathy erosion toward future human generations has become an acceptable norm. Today carbon emissions are permitted to increase at reckless rates by governments in thrall to a failed energy paradigm and its catastrophic infrastructure. An upsurge in extreme weather events is now treated as the “new normal,” while the mainstream media — themselves powerful corporations — ignore the fact that such disasters have been repeatedly predicted by climate science.

Wilson asked whether our species has a suicidal tendency. The jury is still out on that question. History does clearly show, however, that war, genocide and other man-made disasters can be orchestrated by zero-empathy individuals in positions of power. How much more so, then, byzero-empathy institutions seeking “full-spectrum dominance”?

Breakout From the Matrix

Film and television are technologies that have the potential to be genuine art forms. Today, however, they are predominantly used by media corporations to create and maintain a simulated reality: the matrix of consumer capitalism. The ideology perpetuated by this all-pervasive matrix insists that happiness exists in direct proportion to consumption, “because you’re worth it.” Saturation advertising, which exploits the latest research into psychological manipulation, alternates with selective news, soap operas, thrillers, game shows, so-called reality shows and other disempowering trance-inductions.

The medium is also the message: virtual reality is the new norm. As we disconnect from the immediate biological world of interpersonal relationships and interdependent species, we adapt to an artificial one, where climate breakdown disappears when we don’t believe in it.

“Frozen Planet” is an excellent seven-part BBC television series wherein Sir David Attenborough celebrates the extraordinary ecology and wildlife of Earth’s polar regions. British viewers saw all seven episodes, the last addressing the momentous effects of climate change on the Arctic and Antarctic. Thirty worldwide TV networks purchased this series. A third of them (including Discovery Channel in the U.S.) elected to do without the “optional extra” of the final episode. In the real world, the Arctic sea ice continues its precipitous decline. While the climate models of global warming that predicted this have been ignored by governments, a comprehensive collapse has happened faster than any model could predict.

In the real world we do not get to avoid the final episode. It’s time to break out of our unsustainable zero-empathy matrix. To be or not to be is now the pressing spiritual question before us — as individuals, as citizens, as a civilization and as a species.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/beyond-the-matrix-a-buddhist-approach/feed/0Occupy the Climate Emergency: Buddhist Reflections on Inter-generational Justicehttp://sweepingzen.com/occupy-the-climate-emergency-buddhist-reflections-on-inter-generational-justice/
http://sweepingzen.com/occupy-the-climate-emergency-buddhist-reflections-on-inter-generational-justice/#commentsMon, 05 Dec 2011 06:18:07 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44296We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and the survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate. –James Lovelock, The ...

We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and the survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.
–James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

You live inside us, beings of the future.
In the spiral ribbons of our cells, you are here…
You who come after, help us remember: we are your ancestors.
Fill us with gladness for the work that must be done.
–Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

Keeping up with the world’s soaring carbon emissions is not for the faint of heart. In 2010, they reached a new high of 33.5 billion tons. This was 6 percent more than in 2009, the highest ever year-on-year increase — despite a worldwide decline in economic growth.

China’s yearly contribution increased by 9.3 percent, and now makes up over 24 percent of total global emissions. America, the former world heavyweight champion of carbon pollution, is still generating 16 percent of the total. India’s emissions have jumped 9.4 percent to over two billion tons, placing it third in this game of existential “chicken.”

None of these leading emitters has agreed to sign an international treaty that would obligate them to cut emissions. It’s uncannily reminiscent of Professor Lovelock’s prediction, cited above, fromThe Revenge of Gaia (2006). So is the worst indeed going to happen?

Denial, Disempowerment & Depression

Some of the answers can be found at the intersection of psychology, culture and politics. According to the Center for Disease Control, antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased 400 percent over the last 20 years. Antidepressants are now the commonest type of medication taken by Americans from their late teens to mid-forties.

Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine points out that people have been taught (through advertising) to understand demoralization or despair as a medical condition that requires a pharmacological cure. They “consume” medical treatment rather than ask pointed questions about the goals and values of their society. What if feeling demoralized is an appropriate response to deteriorating — indeed, self-destructive — economic and social institutions?

Levine suggests that depressive symptoms like helplessness, hopelessness and immobilization might often be better adressed through political engagement and activism that challenges unjust and exploitative social arrangements. For example, about one trillion dollars of student-loan debt now rests on the shoulders of young Americans. When we understand what’s actually happening, we also see that it’s more an issue of inter-generational justice than a reason for young people to take antidepressants.

Showing up for your life

People participating in the Occupy movement against corporate power speak of the invigorating effects of taking action together, and how much they enjoy being involved in non-hierarchical, truly democratic discussions. Genuine human communication is more satisfying than consumerism and its corollary, climate change denial.

Happily, Occupy continues to spread because it is more liberating — and more fun — than the media circus and electronic cabaret that usually divert us from looking deeper at hopelessness. It asks taboo political questions that expose the nature of the corporatocracy. It creates memes and messages that ring with relevance. As one sign put it: “Lost a job and found an occupation.” To occupy something is the opposite of denial. We are the 99 percent and we are showing up for our life now!

Crunch time

Environmental scientist Lester Brown points out that humanity is in a race between tipping points. There is the social tipping point for taking urgent action to halt further global change. There is also the climate tipping point, beyond which global warming becomes self-sustaining (or “runaway”) and human intervention becomes irrelevant.

This will not be a long race. The head of one large establishment institution, the International Energy Authority (IEA), has just announced that fossil fuel plants being built now will produce carbon emissions for decades, creating a “lock-in” effect leading to irreversible climate change. If we do not change this system within five years, the results will be disastrous.

The governments of the largest carbon polluter nations express no enthusiasm about signing a binding treaty at the current U.N. COP-17 climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Their excuse is the difficulty of squaring the historic carbon debt of the overdeveloped world with the need for developing countries to accept universal emissions reductions now. We are told we may need to wait until 2020–a date that is clearly too late for a safe-climate future.

So, have we reached the social tipping point? The Occupy movement did not arise in a vacuum. Like the “Arab Spring”, it is led by young people who have lost what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “ontological security” — the mental stability that depends on a sense of continuity of the world and the future. Today Buddhism and all other religions must either demonstrate their relevance to this issue, or be consigned to history. Speaking about the “awesome responsibility of this political moment,” author and activist Naomi Klein points out that the solutions to the economic and ecological crises are one and the same — because they have a single cause, the mentality of corporate capitalism. We have to determine together what we want to build in the rubble of the present collapsing system.

Here are a few things we already know. Fossil fuels are responsible for 80 percent of global warming. Large fossil fuel corporations are so wealthy they dictate policy to governments. Amazingly, the world still pays them $409 billion a year in subsidies (according to the IEA), to extract the last oil, coal and gas. A recent joint statement by 11 national engineering institutes tells us we have all the clean technology needed to cut emissions 85 percent by 2050. What is required is that governments free themselves from the grip of big carbon companies and mandate this transformation. That will also solve another big problem: the only way to create millions of new jobs now is to build the new green economy.

Something of great moral significance is needed to complete this narrative. Since our time on this wondrous planet is brief, we must consider our responsibility to all those who will come after us, whose well-being will depend on the decisions we make today. Shall we sacrifice our children, their children and the next 50 generations for a zero-empathy corporate state? Or shall we “occupy” this climate emergency instead of denying it — until the urgent truth of our situation is acted upon?

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/occupy-the-climate-emergency-buddhist-reflections-on-inter-generational-justice/feed/1Awakening From The Illusion Of Our Separatenesshttp://sweepingzen.com/awakening-from-the-illusion-of-our-separateness/
http://sweepingzen.com/awakening-from-the-illusion-of-our-separateness/#commentsTue, 11 Oct 2011 06:15:24 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44293We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness. –Thich Nhat Hanh I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. –Dogen By David Loy & John Stanley Do Buddhist teachings offer a different way ...

Do Buddhist teachings offer a different way of understanding the ecological crisis? Although the Buddha lived a long time ago, there seem to be profound parallels between what he taught about our individual predicament and our collective ecological predicament today. If those parallels are valid, the eco-crisis is not only a technological and economic challenge but also a spiritual one.

In both cases the basic problem is duality: the delusive sense of a separation between myself and other people, between ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.

In contemporary terms, our sense of being separate from others is a psychosocial construct, composed of habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting. The construction of a “me” inside is also the construction of an external, objective world experienced as outside. This duality is at the root of my suffering, because the supposedly separate self is always insecure. It can never secure itself because there’s nothing substantial that could be secured. But we nonetheless keep trying to secure ourselves, usually by identifying with things “outside” us that (we think) can provide the grounding we crave: money, possessions, reputation, etc. Tragically, such attempts to solve the problem often reinforce the sense that there’s a “me” separate from others.

The Buddhist solution to this predicament is not to get rid of the self, because there is no substantial self to get rid of. I simply need to “wake up” and see through the illusion of separation: I am not inside, peering out at an external world. Rather, “I” am what the whole world is doing, right here and now. This realization frees me to live as I choose, but that will naturally be in a way that contributes to the well-being of the whole, because I don’t feel apart from that whole.

1. Like the self, human civilization is also a construct that involves separation and suffering. That civilization is our collective construct, which we can and do reconstruct, is obvious to us but was not obvious to most premodern societies, which assumed that their own social structure was just as natural (and therefore inevitable) as their local ecosystems. The distinctions we now make between the natural world, the social order, and religion did not exist for such cultures. Often they believed they served an important function in keeping the cosmos going: for the Aztecs, mass human sacrifice kept the sun-god on his correct course through the heavens.

The important point is that such peoples shared a collective sense of meaning we have lost today. That meaning was built into the cosmos and revealed by their religion, both taken for granted. In contrast, the meaning of our lives and our societies has become something that we have to determine for ourselves in a universe whose meaningfulness (if any) is no longer obvious. The price of the freedoms we cherish today is losing their kind of “social security”: the basic comfort that comes from “knowing” one’s place and role. What sort of world, what kind of society, do we want? If we cannot depend on God or godlike rulers to tell us, we are thrown back upon ourselves, and the lack of any grounding greater than ourselves is a profound source of suffering, collective as well as individual.

2. Our collective response to that alienation and anxiety is making things worse. Just as I try to secure my anxious sense of self “inside” by compulsively identifying with things in the “outside” world, the collective equivalent is our institutionalized obsession with never-ending “progress.” What motivates our attitude towards economic and technological “growthism”? Why do we always need more? Why is more always better if it can never be enough?

Technology and economic growth in themselves may be a good means to accomplish something but they are not good as ends-in-themselves. Since we are not sure what else to value and seek, however, they have become a collective substitute: a kind of secular salvation that we pursue but never quite attain. Lacking the security that comes from “knowing” our role in the cosmos, we have become demonically obsessed with ever-increasing power and control, trying to remold the earth until everything becomes a “resource” to use. Ironically, if predictably, this has not been providing the sense of security and meaning that we seek. Culturally as well as individually, we have become more anxious and confused.

3. Just as there is no need to get rid of the separate self, because it is a delusion, so there is no need to return to nature, because we have never left it. The Earth is not only our home, it is our mother. In fact, our relationship is even more intimate, because we can never cut the umbilical cord. The air, water, and food that pass through us have always been part of a greater holistic system that circulates through us.

If this is an accurate description of our collective situation, the ecological crisis requires more than a technological response. We must recognize that we are an integral part of the natural world and embrace our responsibility for its welfare, for the well-being of the biosphere ultimately cannot be distinguished from our own well-being.

But how does realizing our nonduality with the Earth resolve the basic anxiety that haunts us now, because we must create our own meaning in a world where God has died? Like it or not, today we are called upon to serve a vital function: the long-term task of repairing the rupture between us and Mother Earth. That healing will transform us as much as the biosphere.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/awakening-from-the-illusion-of-our-separateness/feed/0Buddhism and the End of Economic Growthhttp://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-end-of-economic-growth/
http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-end-of-economic-growth/#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2011 06:12:56 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44289“We are seeing a perfect storm of converging crises that together represent a watershed moment in the history of our species. We are witnesses to, and participants in, a transition from decades of growth to decades of economic contraction.” –Richard Heinberg “True development is in harmony with the needs of people and the rhythms of ...

“We are seeing a perfect storm of converging crises that together represent a watershed moment in the history of our species. We are witnesses to, and participants in, a transition from decades of growth to decades of economic contraction.” –Richard Heinberg

“True development is in harmony with the needs of people and the rhythms of the natural world. Humans are part of the universe, not its masters. This awareness of the interrelatedness of all things, as expressed in Buddhism, is also lived in the traditions of indigenous peoples throughout the world.” –Sulak Sivaraksa

It is increasingly obvious that natural limitations will soon force economic growth to cease. Although this view has been well-studied for at least 40 years, it still remains largely unexamined by the mainstream media. National leaders and corporate CEOs continue to insist that the economy is the true heartbeat of human society, and its growth is the only valid measure of social progress. From this perspective there is very little difference between the top levels of government and the top levels of corporate management. Both are preoccupied with promoting endless growth, because both believe in what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market, which magically transcends physical and biological limits.

As Dan Hamburg concluded in 1997 from his years as a U.S. Congressman, “The real government of our country is economic, dominated by large corporations that charter the state to their bidding. Fostering a secure environment in which corporations and their investors can flourish is the paramount objective of both [political] parties.” Back in 1932, Huey Long expressed this colorfully: “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”

However, something more powerful than an invisible hand is turning our economic assumptions upside down. Economic growth remains blocked. The so-called “recovery” of the last two years (recovery for the banks and Wall Street, not for the rest) has stalled. The official explanation blames the vast accumulation of financial debt. But there are other long-term obstacles to growth that are even more difficult to address, especially the shock of resource depletion. Since the 1970s there has been a recession every time the price of oil passes $80 per barrel. An increasing number of environmental disasters are resulting from oil drilling and nuclear power generation. Large-scale global warming impacts have already appeared in Russia, Pakistan, China, Africa and Australia — and Texas. The consequences include major reductions in crop yields that are driving up world food prices.

As Richard Heinberg points out, these are converging crises. They will compel our civilization to re-think the way it understands the relationship between the economy and the rest of the biosphere. Sooner or later, we will have to adopt a sane and well-reasoned “steady state” economythat operates mindfully within the Earth’s resource and energy budget. Although you would not guess it from the mainstream media, our contemporary obsession with economic growth is already a “dead man walking.”

Thai Buddhist elder Sulak Sivaraksa believes the future of the world must include interconnectedness, which for him is a spiritual perspective that dwells in the human heart. Globalization preaches the interdependence of nations, but that type of economic interconnectedness functions in a very different way: in Asia it has brought free-market fundamentalism, environmental degradation, and the destruction of Buddhist culture and values by consumerism. The same inner corrosion has been happening in “overdeveloped” as well as in “underdeveloped” countries. Individuals are induced by advertising to earn more to acquire more, creating an endless cycle of greed and insecurity. Those who die with the most toys “win.”

According to Buddhist teachings, it doesn’t have to be like this. Buddhists should add their voices to other calls for society to go beyond the one-dimensional measurement of gross domestic product (GDP), which is merely a crude total of collective expenditures. The Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan has developed an alternative way to calculate social improvement, the Gross National Happiness index. This measures nine aspects of society: time-use, living standards, good governance, psychological well-being, community vitality, culture, health, education and ecology. The Happy Planet Index (HPI), developed by the New Economics Foundation in the UK, compares life satisfaction, life expectancy and ecological footprints across the world. Countries that exemplify “successful economic development” are some of the worst performers in sustainable well-being. Britain is midway down the table in 74th place. The U.S. is in 114th place. Costa Rica has the best score.

Today it is essential that Buddhists think critically and challenge the fetish of economic growth. Buddhist leaders such as the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and Sulak Sivaraksa have been emphasizing this for years, and now the crunch has arrived. If humanity is to survive and thrive during this century, we must quickly learn to accept — indeed, to embrace — the need for limits. Buddhist teachings emphasize that this does not require a reduction in the quality of life. On the contrary, a creative “downshift” will help us to focus on what is most important in life.

If, in the midst of converging global crises, we wish to enhance our awareness of the interrelatedness of all things, and promote genuine spiritual contentment, we must emphasize and live by another way of life: the steady-state economy. In this fashion we can minimize, for ourselves and others, the social difficulties of transition from decades of economic growth to decades of economic contraction.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-end-of-economic-growth/feed/0Why the Buddha Touched the Earthhttp://sweepingzen.com/why-the-buddha-touched-the-earth/
http://sweepingzen.com/why-the-buddha-touched-the-earth/#commentsSun, 14 Aug 2011 06:04:39 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44285“The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise — then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not ...

“The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise — then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish.” –Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

“The term ‘engaged Buddhism’ was created to restore the true meaning of Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism is simply Buddhism applied in our daily lives. If it’s not engaged, it can’t be called Buddhism. Buddhist practice takes place not only in monasteries, meditation halls and Buddhist institutes, but in whatever situation we find ourselves. Engaged Buddhism means the activities of daily life combined with the practice of mindfulness. –Thich Nhat Hanh

In one of Buddhism’s iconic images, Gautama Buddha sits in meditation with his left palm upright on his lap, while his right hand touches the earth. Demonic forces have tried to unseat him, because their king, Mara, claims that place under the bodhi tree. As they proclaim their leader’s powers, Mara demands that Gautama produce a witness to confirm his spiritual awakening. The Buddha simply touches the earth with his right hand, and the Earth itself immediately responds: “I am your witness.” Mara and his minions vanish. The morning star appears in the sky. This moment of supreme enlightenment is the central experience from which the whole of the Buddhist tradition unfolds.

The great 20th-century Vedantin, Ramana Maharshi said that the Earth is in a constant state ofdhyana. The Buddha’s earth-witness mudra (hand position) is a beautiful example of “embodied cognition.” His posture and gesture embody unshakeable self-realization. He does not ask heavenly beings for assistance. Instead, without using any words, the Buddha calls on the Earth to bear witness.

The Earth has observed much more than the Buddha’s awakening. For the last 3 billion years the Earth has borne witness to the evolution of its innumerable life-forms, from unicellular creatures to the extraordinary diversity and complexity of plant and animal life that flourishes today. We not only observe this multiplicity, we are part of it — even as our species continues to damage it. Many biologists predict that half the Earth’s plant and animal species could disappear by the end of this century, on the current growth trajectories of human population, economy and pollution. This sobering fact reminds us that global warming is the primary, but not the only, extraordinary ecological crisis confronting us today.

Has Mara taken a new form today — as our own species? Just as Mara claimed the Buddha’s sitting-place as his own, Homo sapiens today claims, in effect, that the only really important species is itself. All other species have meaning and value only insofar as they serve our purposes. Indeed, powerful elements of our economic system (notably Big Oil and its enablers) seem to have relocated to the state of “zero empathy,” a characteristic of psychopathic or narcissistic personalities.

The Earth community has a self-emergent, interdependent, cooperative nature. We humans have no substance or reality that is separate from this community. Thich Nhat Hanh refers to this as our “inter-being”: we and other species “inter-are.” If we base our life and conduct on this truth, we transcend the notion that Buddhist practice takes place within a religious framework that promotes only our own individual awakening. We realize the importance of integrating the practice of mindfulness into the activities of daily life. And if we really consider Mother Earth as an integral community and a witness of enlightenment, don’t we have a responsibility to protect her through mindful “sacred activism“?

This year the U.S. president will determine whether or not to approve a proposed pipeline, which will extend from the “great American carbon bomb” of the Alberta Tar Sands to the Texas oil refineries. The implications are enormous. The devastation that would result from processing and burning even half the Tar Sands oil is literally incalculable: the resulting increase in atmospheric carbon would trigger “tipping points” for runaway global warming. Our best climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, states that if this project alone goes ahead, it will be “game over” for the Earth’s climate. This is a challenge we cannot evade. It is crucial for Buddhists to join forces with other concerned people in creative and resolute opposition to this potentially fatal new folly.

As the Buddha’s enlightenment reminds us, our awakening too is linked to the Earth. The Earth bore witness to the Buddha, and now the Earth needs us to bear witness — to its dhyana, its steadfastness, the matrix of support it continually provides for living beings. New types of bodhisattvas — “ecosattvas” — are needed, who combine the practice of self-transformation with devotion to social and ecological transformation. Yes, we need to write letters and emails to the President, hopefully to influence his decision. But we may also need to consider other strategies if such appeals are ignored, such as nonviolent civil disobedience. That’s because this decision isn’t just about a financial debt ceiling. This is about the Earth’s carbon ceiling. This is about humanity’s survival ceiling. As the Earth is our witness.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/why-the-buddha-touched-the-earth/feed/0Compassion and the Shadowhttp://sweepingzen.com/compassion-and-the-shadow/
http://sweepingzen.com/compassion-and-the-shadow/#commentsMon, 18 Jul 2011 05:59:16 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44281“We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man … far too little. His psyche should be studied — because we are the origin of all coming evil.” –C.G. Jung ...

“We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man … far too little. His psyche should be studied — because we are the origin of all coming evil.” –C.G. Jung

“Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source both of inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.” –The Dalai Lama

Humans are wired for empathy, love and cooperation. Because we are psychological animals, however, one recurring factor undermines many of our actions. Our “shadow,” as C.G. Jung called the repressed (hidden and often projected) aspect of the personality, tends to assume a life of its own because it is composed of the parts of myself I don’t acknowledge and therefore can’t integrate into my conscious life. What makes this shadow even more problematic is that it isn’t only an individual matter. Our shadows can fuse together, as often happens in wartime, for example, when the enemy comes to symbolize everything evil and despicable about our human nature.

Cognitive neuroscience has discovered that the human brain possesses mirror neurons that automatically enable us to share and enact the experiences of others. Looking at someone else eat a juicy piece of fruit on a hot day, I “virtually” experience those flavours and textures, as well as the refreshment of the person eating it. Looking at television footage of tsunami survivors stirs a deep emotional identification with their devastated choices. Mirror neurons are one of the main drivers of empathy, an automated response over which we have limited control. We may choose or fail to act on empathy, but except for a small percentage of us — those we call psychopaths — nobody is immune to another’s situation. It has even been suggested that mirror neurons may save the human species because they might inspire an emerging pattern of compassionate response to the on-going global cascade of extreme weather disasters, high-tech accidents and geophysical events such as earthquakes.

On our digitally connected planet, we now easily share information without geographical limitation through the Internet, mobile phones and other social media tools. As climate chaos disasters unfold, we might witness a sustained rise in collective compassion, leading to genuine international cooperation and unity of the human species. The invigoration of democracy and social justice in the Middle East might be an early example of this trend.

But there’s also our shadow. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran points out that humans are sometimes called the “Machiavellian primate” because of our ability to “read minds” in order to predict other peoples’ behaviour and then outsmart them. Indeed, apes and humans may be so good at reading others’ intentions because we share a specialized brain module that helps us understand others’ motivations and anticipate their behaviour. Does that give us insight into how our “mental environment” has become a vast network of infotainment empires (such as the aptly named News Corporation) focused on collective manipulation? And how did mass advertising become the greatest unregulated social engineering experiment in human history?

The Buddha said little about evil per se but he had a lot to say about the three “roots of evil”: greed, ill will and delusion. Today they have become institutionalized: our economic system institutionalizes greed, militarism is institutionalized ill will and our powerful media mega-corporations institutionalize delusion. They are the main ways our collective shadow operates today.

We cannot yet know whether the wave of natural disasters that has begun to change the face of the Earth will drive us to a social tipping point that prioritizes collective compassion. Could it unify the environmental and social justice movements? Primatologist Frans de Waal asks why natural selection designed our brains so that we are so much in tune with our fellow beings as to feel distress and pleasure along with them. If exploitation of others were all that matters, evolution would never have gotten into the empathy business.

We have choices to make. High-tech social manipulation is failing humanity. It restricts us to an economic model based on perpetual growth — essentially a global Ponzi scheme that robs our children and grandchildren in order to feed its pathological greed. To look clearly and deeply at this collective shadow requires the inner focus, courage and strength of sustained meditation. It is a spiritual task that Buddhists and others can no longer avoid.

The shadow can overwhelm us when the conscious mind is shocked or confused. This can happen collectively, providing the context for “disaster capitalism” as described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine.” Jung referred to the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, stating that if Jekyll (the conscious personality) fails to identify the shadow, it will become its slave — subject to compulsions it cannot understand, its capacity to act paralyzed. In just such a manner, surely, do we collectively ignore the loudly ringing alarm bells of climate science, population biology, oceanography and resource depletion.

Nowadays, contemplative practices are needed to clarify our values, so that we may communicate them effectively. Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is the only thing left that can make a human future possible. Such love is not a mere luxury. It is fundamental to the continued survival of our species.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/compassion-and-the-shadow/feed/0A Buddhist Perspective On Ecological Responsibilityhttp://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-perspective-on-ecological-responsibility/
http://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-perspective-on-ecological-responsibility/#commentsWed, 15 Jun 2011 05:44:00 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44274“The institutions of our society co-arise with us. They are not independent structures separate from our inner lives, like some backdrop to our personal dramas. Nor are they merely projections of our own minds. As collective forms of our ignorance, fears and greed, they acquire their own momentum, enlist our massive obedience, and depend on ...

“The institutions of our society co-arise with us. They are not independent structures separate from our inner lives, like some backdrop to our personal dramas. Nor are they merely projections of our own minds. As collective forms of our ignorance, fears and greed, they acquire their own momentum, enlist our massive obedience, and depend on our collective consent.” –Joanna Macy: World As Lover, World As Self

“Sit, be still, and listen,
For you are drunk,
And we are at the edge of the roof.” –Rumi

The Buddha famously pointed out that our unhappiness is a result of craving. To end suffering, he proposed self-restraint, minimal consumption, sharing and other mindful ways of retraining our acquisitive focus on “I, me, mine.” These practices enlarge our capacity for empathy and contentment, for they recognize our interdependence; what Thich Nhat Hanh calls our “inter-being.” The sense of a self that is separate from the rest of the world is an illusion — indeed, it is our most problematic delusion. The world, as eco-theologian Thomas Berry noted, is not a collection of objects: it is a communion of subjects.

The greed, materialism and alienation from nature that are the hallmarks of our corporate-dominated world are supported by the supine attitude of “democratic” governments, which today are largely controlled by the economic institutions they should be regulating. They share the same worldview, which emphasizes endless economic growth no matter what the long-term consequences may be. This joint “corporatocracy” appears to be unchallengeable, despite the fact that its ecological consequences already include record-breaking droughts, floods, snowstorms, wildfires and tornadoes. Environmental scientist Lester Brown believes that large-scale crop failures are the most likely trigger of a collective awakening. They may create the necessary “social tipping point” that finally motivates us to truly address the ecological crisis. Evidently, nothing less can wake us from collective narcissism.

There will be a variety of hells to pay, in either case. All the energy added to the Earth system by the industrial growth economy since the 1950s has already initiated dangerous climatic and geological transformations. Last month, even The Economist, that darling of conservative business, put the scientific news about the Anthropocene period on its front cover. They were just in time to anticipate the most recent scientific report on the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Driven by accelerating emissions from coal-fired industrialization in China and India, last year’s global increase of 1.6 parts per million (ppm) was the highest ever recorded, and took us up to 395 ppm. The “safe” level of atmospheric CO2 that characterized the last 12,000 years — the climatic period that allowed humanity to develop agriculture and civilization — was 350ppm. The current trend of the industrial growth society will be very difficult to stabilize even at 450ppm, the concentration science says would give humanity a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to a “survivable” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Does anyone want to fly rough, with an airline that offers a 50 percent chance of arrival?

In his remarkable book “Requiem for a Species,” Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at the Australian National University, argues persuasively that our society has chosen not to act to protect itself from devastating climate change. Scientific facts have been defeated by power, money and bureaucratic inertia — and the exploitation of cognitive dissonance, whereby we are unable to acknowledge what we do not want to see.

One of Hamilton’s findings is that “green consumerism” has had the effect of shifting responsibility from corporations, which are accountable for most carbon pollution, and from governments that should be restraining them, onto the shoulders of private consumers, who are called upon to solve the climate crisis by changing consumption patterns. This disempowers us by denying our agency as citizens and political actors, and reinforces our identity as consumers. Again, it’s cheaper for corporations to change public perception of what they do, rather than actually change what they do. So a large percentage of global marketing and PR resources is now dedicated to persuading the public that fossil fuels are essential and benign. “Clean Coal” is the most cynical example of this Machievellian genre, “greenwash.”

As Buddhist elder Joanna Macy states above, institutionalized ignorance, fear and greed have acquired their own momentum and enlisted our massive obedience. But awareness of what is happening enables choice. The time has come for us to declare — and to share the news as widely as possible — that they no longer command our collective consent. Alternatives are not only possible, they are necessary. We must insist that governments make it their top priority to stop the fossil fuel-driven collapse of functional agriculture and a liveable global ecosystem. And if, as Macy and Hamilton independently find, we must pass through despair and acceptance before we can act, there’s no better time to do so. Uncertainty and the breakdown of what needs to break down are factors that can encourage spiritual awakening. They can help us develop an awakened way of being in the world that acknowledges and celebrates our “inter-being.”

What is true for the person is also true for the culture, which is why Rumi’s lines are so appropriate now. We have drunk deeply from the virtual reality of electronic media, and now find it difficult to comprehend the increasingly uncomfortable reality we actually live in. Haunted by half a century of hidden persuasion, we are tottering together at the edge of the roof. A “perfect storm” of climate chaos is swiftly approaching. It’s time to get our feet back on the ground. The authentic way of being in the world now is to act to save ourselves — and our children — from the institutionalized forms of ignorance and greed that constitute our economic and political systems and that cannot cope with what they have created.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/a-buddhist-perspective-on-ecological-responsibility/feed/0Buddhism and the Fate of the Specieshttp://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-fate-of-the-species/
http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-fate-of-the-species/#commentsThu, 12 May 2011 05:23:19 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=44269Another externality dismissed in market systems is the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who conduct propaganda campaigns to convince ...

Another externality dismissed in market systems is the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who conduct propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don’t, someone else will. And this vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. –Noam Chomsky, Is the World Too Big to Fail? (2011)

The most pressing issue now facing our world is the state of the environment. If things are allowed to worsen, our world could turn into a hungry ghost realm. So we, as bodhisattvas, have the duty to protect it and promote its wellbeing. And the most useful way we can do so is by awakening as many minds as possible to the magnitude and urgency of this issue. –Sakya Trizin Rinpoche (2010)

In Buddhist mythology, the world of the hungry ghosts is one of the six realms of conditioned being depicted in the Buddhist “wheel of life.” Its three higher realms are inhabited by gods, titans and humans. The three lower realms are those of animals, hell beings and hungry ghosts. In the first quotation above, an eminent Buddhist master warns that our global ecological crisis could lead to the Earth degenerating from a biosphere that supports an extraordinarily rich variety of human (and other animal and plant) life into a world populated by hungry ghosts.

A traditional Buddhist belief is that self-realization is possible only on the biological basis of a human body. So Sakya Trizin points out that global ecological collapse could also eliminate the possibility of enlightenment from the Earth. Understood more metaphorically, the collapse of human civilization, which has become a very real possibility, might leave only a few humans desperately struggling to survive on an impoverished planet, preoccupied indefinitely with finding their next meal and unable to focus on anything else.

Dr Gabor Maté, a psychiatrist working with hard drug addicts, sees the wheel of life as a mandala revolving through six realms, populated by different aspects of human existence. In the animal realm we are driven by basic survival instincts and appetites; in the hell realm by states of unbearable rage and despair. The hungry ghost realm is the domain of addiction where we endlessly seek something outside ourselves to satisfy an insatiable yearning for fulfilment. The street addicts in his care spend almost all their time in this state. But many of us move back and forth between realms, even in the course of a day. Maté considers that “post-industrial” capitalism has created a society addicted to shopping, work, drugs and sex. If we ask how such a “hungry ghost society” would treat its ecological inheritance, perhaps we should study those street addicts.

Of course, this state of affairs also has everything to do with leadership. How do we address the type of psychopathology among leaders that recommends we follow “business-as-usual” to the bitter end of ecological collapse? We all understand homicide. Thanks to the 20th century, we also recognize genocide. But we haven’t yet agreed on a word to denote what the human species is doing now: killing great ecosystems like the world’s oceans, destroying the stable climate system upon which agriculture itself depends or driving more than half the species on Earth to extinction. We are not witnessing a failure of imagination, but rather the triumph of propaganda. It is especially the case in the world’s most powerful country, America, where the media that have become our “collective nervous system” are concerned not to inform us, but to sell our eyeballs to advertisers.

An important part of genuine education is realizing that many of the things we think are natural and inevitable (and therefore should accept) are in fact conditioned (and therefore can be changed). The world doesn’t need to be the way it is; there are other possibilities. The present role of the media is to foreclose most of those possibilities by confining public awareness and discussion within narrow limits. Our society is now dominated by a power elite composed of governments and large corporations which include the major media outlets. People move easily from each of these institutions to the other because there is very little difference in their worldview or goals — primarily economic expansion. As John Dewey put it a long time ago, politics remains “the shadow cast by big business over society.” The role of the media in this unholy alliance is to “normalize” this situation, so that we accept it and continue to perform our required roles, especially the frenzied production and compulsive consumption necessary to keep the economy growing.

Meanwhile, weather-related disasters increase every year and the world begins to burn. Our best scientists have carefully researched and published their findings in authoritative professional journals. But as Chomsky points out, the scientific consensus itself has been drowned in a high tide of corporate propaganda. The very fate of our species is being treated as a mere “externality” by free market ideology.

Ban Ki Moon, secretary-general of the U.N., warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year that our model of economic growth has become not merely obsolete, but a global suicide pact. We have mined our way to growth, burned our way to prosperity and believed in consumption without consequences. In the 21st century, all resources are running short and the one we are most clearly running out of is time — time to build a new sustainable economic model for survival. That is why Sakya Trizin alerts us to another grave dimension of climate change: that it may lead us to the extinction of the human spirit, of wisdom and of the lineage of enlightenment itself.

]]>http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-the-fate-of-the-species/feed/0A Sustainable Enlightenment (Earth Day 2011)http://sweepingzen.com/a-sustainable-enlightenment-earth-day-2011/
http://sweepingzen.com/a-sustainable-enlightenment-earth-day-2011/#commentsFri, 22 Apr 2011 19:48:28 +0000http://sweepingzen.com/?p=28578By John Stanley & David Loy It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe Looking again and again at that which cannot be looked at, Unseeable ...

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Looking again and again at that which cannot be looked at,
Unseeable reality is seen just as it is.
Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, Mahamudra Aspiration Prayer

The first of these statements describes the apparent death wish of industrial civilization, while the second describes the deep meditative experience of a thirteenth century Buddhist master. We in the Ecobuddhism project understand the present as an historical period of ecological, existential and spiritual crisis: a time when such apparent opposites have something crucial to say to each other.

The rise and fall of western enlightenment

The “enlightenment” recognized by mainstream Western culture was a cultural shift in the seventeenth century—from belief in a pan-European Christian worldview to trust in mechanistic science and secular humanism. Since then we have understood Nature and ourselves to be machine-like. The industrial growth society is a product of that Cartesian worldview. Over the last sixty years, a fetish of limitless economic growth has driven us faster and further than ever before. This is a society that cannot stop to ask sincerely where it is going.

At the end of the hottest decade on record, we are surrounded by unprecedented droughts, floods, crop losses and technological accidents. The mainstream media, still peddling “classical” economics, ignores either climate science or clean energy as legitimate subjects of interest. It fails to join up the dots for people on the most important issue of our time: the survival of life on Earth. Scientific findings and warnings are relentlessly subverted by fossil fuel corporations, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to manufacture doubt about global warming, distort the democratic process and safeguard the very energy infrastructure that caused the crisis. It is beginning to look as if western enlightenment has run its course—that it will fail to prevent the collapse of global civilization.

A Great Awakening

In the 20th century the Western world became aware of another type of enlightenment, the “great awakening” of the Buddha. Starting with one person, its sustainability became evident in methods of training, wisdom and trans-cultural influence that have endured for 2500 years. Many men and women across a variety of cultures have used this path and experienced their own awakening. Might they be able to help us overcome our collective malaise in the face of ecological chaos?

The Buddha had a deeply-felt understanding of limits. Happiness, he found, isn’t gained by trying to satisfy all our desires. In fact, a minimalist approach to possessions positively enhances long-term contentment. Meditation can sustain the process of personal transformation. The practitioner uncovers a deep interdependence between the self, the other and the context.

And now?

The Buddha developed a culture of awakening from self-centred conditioning. But we are living in the midst of social-engineering technologies that persuade us to base our identity on consumption. My consumer-self is dogged by dissatisfaction, so I spend more and more to resolve the conditioned anxiety. And I will resist the truth of ecological crisis, because consumption has compelling psychological meaning for me.

If Buddhist meditation is to have comprehensive relevance now, it must be able to cut through such social conditioning. And that must take place in a context that is vastly different from the Indian Bronze Age, when the Buddha first set forth his noble path to awakening.

If I hold beliefs that conflict with each other, I will experience “cognitive dissonance”—a subliminal anxiety resulting from inconsistency. I could try to eliminate this by changing one of the beliefs. I might resort to denial, or find someone else to blame. If my meditation can’t show up these dysfunctional habits of mind for what they are, it could create what Joanna Macy calls “premature equanimity”.

But the great windstorms, fires, droughts, floods and snowstorms of the last decade will not cease to impose a radically new world on us. This is why the eminent Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Every Buddhist practitioner should be a protector of the environment. We have the power to decide the destiny of our planet. If we awaken to our true situation, there will be a change in our collective consciousness.”

A sustaining mythResource depletion, ecological disasters, over-population and climate chaos are indicators of spiritual as well as ecological collapse. They demonstrate also how much we need a story that renews our love for the mystery of the Earth—a story that can integrate the world’s wisdom traditions with the sciences of cosmology and evolution. Thomas Berry pointed out that the Universe itself is our new sacred story. Everything in the Universe had a common origin in the mysterious Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. We ourselves are participants in its awesome physical and spiritual dimensions, which are an authentic source of joy, celebration and support.
Undoubtedly there is a profound challenge to self-realization in the midst of ecological crisis. The process may require us to pass through what Macy calls “uncertainty and positive disintegration”—experiences that stretch, ground and strengthen meditation. If, on all levels, we look “again and again at that which cannot be looked at”, we can nourish our capacity to respond fearlessly and appropriately to the big picture. We can take refuge in the Sacred Universe process.